Active and Accountable Job Placement Services

If it is not possible to return an injured worker to his or her original employment, Hostetler-Fontaine & Associates will then institute what we call "Active and Accountable rehabilitation and job development." While vocational evaluation, vocational testing, and vocational exploration are necessary, they are, in reality, just the preliminaries to the hard work of locating employment.

Active and Accountable job development would include performing labor market surveys on a weekly basis to locate employment opportunities for the injured worker. Then we would schedule appointments for the injured worker to place applications and/or interview. In some cases, we may even escort the injured worker to the interview. It is the vocational rehabilitation counselor's/job developer's responsibility to place phone calls to prospective employers within hours of that appointment to follow up.

This provides us with a number of benefits. First, injured workers are far more likely to keep appointments which have been scheduled for them. Second, if the injured worker understands that someone will be calling the employer within a short time after the interview, this gives him or her more motivation to make a positive impression.

Prompt follow-up phone calls by the job developer keeps the candidate fresh in the employer's mind. If, unfortunately, the injured worker leaves a negative impression, it gives us an opportunity to quickly correct this with the employer and injured worker and return the injured worker to proper job search activity. If the injured worker continues to leave poor impressions after counseling, these activities will allow us to document them thoroughly.

It is the goal of this organization to return injured workers to employment as soon as reasonably possible. We, however, understand that there are some cases where this is not possible and it is our responsibility to document the situation for future considerations.

In Active and Accountable job development, we try to avoid the peaks and valleys of our competitors' typical job development to allow a constant level of activity by the injured worker. Instead of contacting a list of employers one time each month, providing leads to the injured worker, and doing sporadic follow up, we conduct 2-4 sessions of employer contacts per month with subsequent injured worker referral and employer follow up. This system has proven time and again to net the best results as soon as possible.